And yet it is trivial to teach every one of them to identify 128kbit (at least) from uncompressed in just a few short minutes. And it's the kind of thing you pr

And yet it is trivial to teach every one of them to identify 128kbit (at least) from uncompressed in just a few short minutes. And it's the kind of thing you pretty much can't un-hear. Those who want better quality have a legitimate gripe, though for business purposes related to your statement it's best to make a higher bitrate stream as a configuration option and not the default. I think the author is on the wrong track discussing endoing times for 320kbit - it's much more likely that spotify is interested in keeping down their bandwidth costs. A major streaming provider that I'm familiar with actually delivered streams that were 15%-20% under the quoted bitrate on many popular tracks for a few years, but only during periods of peak bandwidth consumption. It saved a significant amount of money and afaik was never detected (they no longer do so).